I’m a Professional Fact-Checker. AI Is Wrong More Often Than You Think
Key takeaways
- Instead, I found a human-created one that the LLM might have scraped.
- Over the past year or so, more and more people have looked at me with great pity.
- WIRED’s fact-checking department is old-school: meticulous line-by-line annotations, primary sources whenever possible, and a broader-scale ethical and legal review.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photo-illustrations: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Nearly half of Americans say they use AI to find information and generate ideas. It’s not hard to see why. As social media devolves into slop—and Google into a glorified landing page for Reddit threads and content farms—most of us are starved for something reliable. Plus, chatbots are so helpful, aren’t they? The first time I interacted with one, I asked if it knew it was a huge drain on resources. Half an hour later, I had a new recipe for vegan cream cheese.
I never tried the recipe. Instead, I found a human-created one that the LLM might have scraped. That’s the way these models work, of course. They repackage collective knowledge into something that feels tailored to you. This may be OK for dairy alternatives (unless you’re a vegan blogger). But on the order of the world, and truth—the focus of my role as a fact-checker at WIRED—the stakes are exponentially higher.
Over the past year or so, more and more people have looked at me with great pity. Surely a fact-checker at a magazine isn’t long for this AI-upgraded world. Call me foolish, but I’m not that worried. Very little of humanity’s collective knowledge, I’ve concluded, lives on the internet. And according to my research, AI is even more wrong than people might think.